The Last Champion: Book 4 of The Last War Series

by Peter Bostrom

  “You might recall,” said Modi, “that one of the damaged future-human ships escaped from the battle. It was intact, largely undamaged, and it hasn’t been located yet.”

  Mattis hadn’t forgotten. Plenty of people were asking questions about that, but few had come up with answers. “Right,” he said. “What do those numbers have to do with anything?”

  Modi preened slightly. “Lynch said I was… and I quote… ‘nuttier than squirrel shit’ when I brought this up, but ever since Z-Space translation has been discovered, tracking a ship which has translated has proved to be almost impossible. We were able to do it before the battle because we could detect radiation from the translation engine of their flagship; they fixed that defect, obviously, and this ship wasn’t equipped with the same model of engine, apparently….”

  “I’m sensing there’s a but here,” said Mattis, impatience starting to creep in. “If we could skip to that, please, I’d be very grateful.”

  Spears, for her part, seemed to be patiently enjoying herself, waiting with hands folded primly in her lap.

  “Right,” said Modi. “Well, the conclusion is… the smaller ships have a weakness too. It’s much harder to exploit, since it involves recreating the state of the Z-Space field at the time of the jump and cross-referencing it with the gravitational wave effects of a ship leaving real space, but from there you can calculate a trajectory.”

  He considered a moment, resting his chin in his hands. “So this will find the missing ship for us?”

  “Oh God no,” said Modi, shaking his head emphatically. “Not even close. It will only tell us where the ship went, not where it is.”

  Of course. Typical Modi. “I understand,” said Mattis, grimacing a bit. “How confident are you in this?”

  “Quite,” said Modi, turning to Spears. “And it’s good you’re here, Captain. The HMS Caernarvon is a heavy frigate, so it’s not quite as powerful as the Midway, but certainly capable. Capable enough to seek out this ship and engage it on our terms.”

  Spears sat impassively, a picture of stoicism in the face of an indirect insult to her ship. She narrowed her eyes. “You’re being quite presumptive there, Commander Modi,” she said. “My ship is currently under orders to conduct a deep space patrol out past the Tiberius sector. We can’t just go traipsing off on some jolly lark all based on a wild hunch.”

  “Of course, of course,” said Modi, waving his hand dismissively. “I understand that. But we don’t need to do very much at all in fact. All we need to do is go to where the Z-Space gravitational eddies terminate and—”

  Spears didn’t seem convinced. “We have our orders, Commander. I can’t divert a ten-thousand ton frigate based on what I heard in a pub. Plus, we don’t know what to do when and if we do find it.”

  Modi gave Mattis a lopsided smile. “We tend to play these kinds of things by ear,” he said. Which was true enough. “Where do the Z-Space eddies terminate?”

  Modi rubbed his hands together. “Well, it just so happens it’s out in the direction of the Tiberius sector anyway….”

  Spears sighed, as if she knew there was no point in arguing. She leaned forward, her chin in her hands, weighing the considerations. “If it would only require a small detour,” she said, almost to herself as much as to the other two. “And we could probably disguise it as some kind of navigational…thing. I’ll have to talk to Blackwood, poor dear, and make her work out the details. But it’s a start.”

  “It’s a start,” echoed Mattis. “To finding the missing ship. And unraveling this mystery of what the hell those future-humans were up to, and what Spectre had to do with it.”

  And a start was better than nothing. “What do you say, Captain Spears?” asked Mattis.

  “Well,” she said, upending her remaining beer in one smooth motion, then blotting her mouth lightly with a napkin. “Since it’s not a big detour… let’s fire the old girl up.”

  Chapter Five

  Hangar Bay III

  Chrysalis

  Harry Reardon ran up the ramp of the Aerostar, firing his pistol behind him wildly. “Sammy! Close the ramp! Close the ramp! Now now now now now now now now now!”

  Bullets screamed into the hull beside him, wailing as they bounced around the inside of the cargo bay. He threw himself flat, hands over his head, as his former business partners—security consultants from Jovian Logistics and Supply—emptied their magazines into the hull and insides of his ship. Fortunately, it was well armored and small arms wouldn’t hurt it.

  Less so, himself. Slowly, agonisingly so, the loading ramp of the Aerostar began to raise. Up. Up. Up.

  “Sammy!” Reardon almost shouted into the radio. “Do something! Fire the guns!”

  “We’re out of ammo for them, bro,” said Sammy. Oh yeah. That had been a thing. Because he hadn’t bought any more ammo for them. Because they hadn’t been able to sell the box. The box currently sitting in their cargo bay. Because the box had a frickin’ mutant and several hundred pounds of explosives in it. “I’m closing up as fast as it’ll go.”

  It needed to go faster. A round skipped off the deck barely an inch from his head. Finally, the ramp sealed shut and everything went quiet except for the ringing in his ears.

  “Sammy,” groaned Reardon, dragging himself to his feet. “We need to get the hell out of here.”

  The deck pitched as the Aerostar lifted off, turned toward the yawning mouth of the hangar bay, and got the hell out of Chrysalis into open space.

  Reardon made his way up to the cockpit, sliding into the pilot’s seat with a huff. “Chrysalis—come for the history, stay because the police won't release your body until cause of death is determined.” He grinned across to Sammy, and the spot where his wheelchair rested in lieu of a proper seat. “Spoiler alert: it’s homicide.”

  “It’s always homicide,” said Sammy, smiling right back. Although, Reardon noted, with seemingly a lot less enthusiasm than normal. “So I’m guessing the deal went south.”

  “The deal didn’t even begin.” Reardon put his feet up on the console. “Serious. They didn’t even give me the package. It was like the moment I walked in, they took one look at me and yanked out their guns.” He twisted in his seat, showing Sammy the fresh bullet hole in his jacket, sticking a finger through and wiggling it against the bulletproof vest below. “Didn’t even give me the courtesy of a warning shot. All smiles, and then the shooting started. Ugh. This is starting to happen far too frequently.”

  “We do seem to get betrayed a lot,” said Sammy, tapping at keys on the console idly with one hand, his other playing with the settings on his wheelchair.

  Reardon frowned. “You okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  Any time Sammy fiddled with his wheelchair he was usually nervous or wanted to say something. “You sure you’re okay? Because there’s something in your tone which suggests that you are not, in fact, okay.”

  “I’m okay.” Sammy wouldn’t look at him. Fiddle, fiddle went his hand on the chair’s settings.

  A familiar song and dance. Reardon waited, just a few seconds, then tried again. “Okay, so. What’s bothering you?”

  “It’s the mutant,” mumbled Sammy. “I mean, it’s not our fault that she’s here, but… we still have to take care of her. And I don’t think she’s getting better.”

  The mutant—they hadn’t given it a name yet, at Reardon’s insistence, and he also firmly considered it an it rather than a she—was obviously not doing too well. Reardon’s best working theory was that opening the box too soon had hurt it in some way, and although it could move and kind of talk, it obviously wasn’t well.

  “Okay,” said Reardon, as the Aerostar drifted further away from Chrysalis, “so what do you want me to do about it?”

  “Well… well, uh, when you were busy getting shot at, I went ahead and took another look at the logs of the ship while Smith was on board.”

  Oh boy, here we go.

  “I know you kept telling me to purge the logs, but
sometimes it’s important to keep this kind of data, you know?”

  It was really not important to keep potentially incriminating evidence around their ship, but Sammy just couldn’t help himself. “Okay,” said Reardon, an edge of exhaustion creeping into his voice. “But we’ve been over this. There isn’t anything there. His phone signals were encrypted, and who knows how many relays it jumped through before it connected.”

  “Seventeen,” Sammy said, matter-of-fact. “That’s what I figured out.”

  Oh. Well. “Okay,” said Reardon. “What does that mean?”

  “Well, it means that fortunately, this time, I managed to figure out that the contact he kept calling was…” Sammy touched a screen in the cockpit. “This number.”

  Just a normal phone number, nothing special about it. “Who’s is it?”

  Sammy’s eyes rolled. “Scroll down. Name’s underneath.”

  “Oh. Interesting.” Reardon stood up and made for the exit. “I gotta piss. Think you can get us to Earth by the time I get back?”

  Sammy grinned. “Consider us already there.”

  Chapter Six

  Location unknown

  Chrysalis

  Lieutenant Patricia “Guano” Corrick struggled to open her eyes. All she could see was sky blue through the thin cracks of her eyelids. Where was Doctor Brooks?

  “You know,” came his familiar voice, words drifting from somewhere at once near and far away, like a nearby speaker. “Sometimes drugs open your mind, and while it’s open a lot of weird shit gets in there.”

  A strange distortion twisted his words, making them difficult to follow. She tried to talk, but her mouth had something in it. Like a tube she could bite down on.

  “Don’t talk,” said Brooks. “Just relax and wake up. Open your eyes.”

  Relax. People telling her to relax always made her stressed; it was like thinking of elephants when someone tells you not to think about elephants. You can’t avoid thinking about them. But, finally, she was able to pry her eyes open. Guano found herself in a tank, roughly two meters wide and ten high, like some kind of glowing blue cigar. A long white, clear tube, full of seemingly nothing protruded from her mouth, snaking upwards toward the top of the vessel. Guano was wearing a bright orange jumpsuit, like a prisoner. She otherwise appeared to be inside a hexagonal room full of computers.

  Through the glass, she could see—warped and distorted like a fun house mirror—Doctor Brooks, staring intently at her. His dark skin was distinctly lighter than last time she’d seen him, and his eyes were sunken, hollow pits, dead and lifeless. His hair seemed to be falling out in clumps, as though he were dying from some kind of horrible radiation, and he had a shiny chrome pistol strapped to his hip.

  “How do you feel?” he asked, raising a hand and, with palpable reluctance, tapping on the glass, as one might try to startle a fish.

  She couldn’t talk, so she shrugged helplessly. Cold. Wet. Weirded out being in an elongated aquarium.

  Brooks gestured to a keyboard, down almost out of sight. She pulled it up, fingers awkwardly finding the keys.

  Hello? She typed. The viscous liquid made the effort difficult. Where am I?

  “Oh, you’re inside a little device which will heal you,” said Doctor Brooks, something strange, something off, about his voice that disquieted her in a way she struggled to comprehend. “Don’t worry. We’ll have you out of there in just two more days.”

  Two more days? Guano’s fingers stabbed at the keys. How long have I been here?

  “A few months,” said Brooks, nodding thoughtfully. “Unfortunately, we had to keep you under for a while. Don’t worry, you’ll be fine.”

  A few months? Drugs? Memories flooded back to her. Memories… You drugged me.

  “I needed to sedate you,” said Brooks, lying through his stupid lying teeth. She could just tell. “You were disorientated. You had a concussion when you landed, along with some damage to your lungs. The system restored you.”

  Oh, there was no way she believed that. Did you clone me or something? She typed angrily, fingers sloshing through the fluid.

  “No,” said Brooks, smiling in that weird, faux-friendly way he had. “The cloning tanks may look similar, but they function quite differently. This one is restorative. ”

  She had been joking, in her just-woken-up brain-dead way, but Brooks acting like this sparked a distinct possibility. He could make a clone of her if he wanted.

  Some part of Guano began to realize that Brooks was not who he appeared to be. Hadn’t been from the start, most likely. Then the memory dragged itself out of her addled brain, like a person dragging themselves out of thick mud. Spectre…

  Spectre.

  Brooks was Spectre.

  How? Did he have control over two bodies? Were there more of him?

  Guano didn’t really know what to type, so she simply hit k and shoved the keyboard away angrily.

  “Oh, don’t be like that.” Brooks emitted a wet, sickly cough that he barely managed to cover with his hand. “Patricia, you have to understand. Things are different now. The galaxy is changing. You have the opportunity to be on the ground floor of something very special indeed.” He smiled broadly. “You know what I’m saying is true; there are people arriving from the future. The future. Traveling back to your time. They aren’t doing it for no reason. They have a goal. They have a plan. And they want you, and others, to be a part of that plan.”

  Guano simply stared at him, glaring through the glass. She fumbled awkwardly for the keyboard, pulled it back in front of her and typed, You know I’m not going to work for you, right?

  Brooks said nothing, just staring at her through the glass, a huge smile on his stupid face.

  Her blood boiled. The smile was the worst thing. So much worse than the unspoken promise of breaking her; so much worse than anything else. She stabbed her fingers at the keyboard. Patricia Corrick. Lieutenant. United States Navy. Serial number 429114939.

  Brook’s smile remained unchanged. “You can play that little game with me,” he said, “but you’ll work with me eventually.”

  Patricia Corrick. Lieutenant. United States Navy. Serial number 429114939.

  “Very well.” Brooks coughed again, wetly and roughly. “You’ll play the game eventually. I know you will.”

  No, that wouldn’t happen. Guano glared at him and then, pointedly, took hold of the tube in her mouth. She began pulling, short little tugs at first, advancing to violent yanks. Something dislodged in her throat, a long thin tube that probably went down to her lungs.

  Brook’s confidence wavered. “Wait,” he said, “stop struggling. It’s dangerous to remove that.”

  She continued pulling. Something broke inside the mechanism that attached it to her mouth and water flooded in. She sealed her lips, holding her breath.

  “Stop,” commanded Brooks, eyes narrowing with anger. “Patricia, what are you doing?”

  Guano didn’t stop. She pulled the whole thing out of her throat, resisting the urge to choke. Water—or whatever the blue liquid she was floating in was—trickled into her mouth. It tasted strangely sweet, like sugar water, or liquid cotton candy.

  Brooks slammed his fist onto a large red button. Alarms sounded. The liquid around her began to recede, draining away into some unseen mechanism. Guano kept holding her breath, folding her arms petulantly.

  Slowly, painfully, the water drained past her head and, lungs burning, she exhaled and took in a breath. And then another, and another.

  “Do you know how expensive that fluid is?” asked Brooks, bitterness in his voice. He moved right up to the glass. “Replacing it will be difficult. You don’t know what you’ve done, Patricia. This place has limited resources, even for someone of my—”

  Guano put her fist through the glass, catching the man by the throat. The whole tube shattered, transforming into long, translucent knives that slashed into her arm and tore up her weird orange jumpsuit, but she held fast.

  “My name,” she grow
led, her voice dark and low. “Is Guano.”

  She squeezed his neck until it snapped, wetly and loudly. Almost too easily, as though it were made of cardboard and not bone. Her fingernails tore into the skin of his neck like wet tissue paper.

  Horrified, Guano tossed the body to the side, barely able to suppress a shudder of revulsion. Fear and pain must have given her strength.

  Gingerly, she stepped out of the ruined tank, trying to avoid as much glass as she could. Strangely, her arm didn’t seem to be bleeding as much as it should have been. The blood kind of seeped out of the long gashes on her arms, rather than gushed, as she might expect from wounds of that size. She was probably dehydrated.

  Moving carefully over Brook’s body, Guano crept toward the computers that lined the walls. They seemed to be mostly diagnostic equipment. Medical stuff.

  A door—really, one of the walls of the hexagon she had woken up in—slid open, computers and all. She balled her fists, head snapping to the noise, ready to fight.

  “Well well well,” said a man who looked remarkably like Doctor Brooks—except … younger—casually stepping through the doorway as though the scene were the most normal thing in the world. “Thank you for taking care of the trash for me. I’d been meaning to get rid of that one for some time now. It was getting somewhat … haggard.”

  Guano’s eyes flicked to the corpse at her feet, then to the identical—and yet, not sick—copy standing in front of her. She grabbed the pistol off the body, drew it up and squeezed the trigger.

  The brand new Brooks didn’t even flinch as the round went through his chest. He merely stared at her, slumping backward against the wall, and then down to the floor.

  Guano, smoking weapon in hand, snatched up the two spare magazines from Brook’s pocket, then ran past his clone and into the corridor, away from the ruined tank and the twin bodies, toward the light.